What We’re Seeing: Off-Broadway’s “HOUND DOG” at Ars Nova
“A sonic mirage of memory packed with cross-generational love, fear, humor, and music”
(Photograph: Ellena Eshraghi, photo by Ben Arons)
In Melis Aker’s world premiere musical play HOUND DOG now running at Ars Nova, a young, dithering musician (the titular character referred to as “Hound Dog”) returns from abroad to her hometown of Ankara, Turkey to look after her widowed father. In the ninety minutes that follow, our heroine dances with destiny, jamming out with the apparitions of her past, present, and could-be future in a sonic mirage of memory packed with cross-generational love, fear, humor, and music.
Machel Ross’s direction generates compelling, rich images of feeling varying degrees of separation between community, family, and one’s own relation to the world. Feeling being the operative word here, as the play fluidly bounces between real and fictional, sometimes in overt showmanship and other times in discreet disarray. The charm and ultimate heartbreak of the piece is found in this memory play sleight of hand that Ross guides, masterfully filtering us through the twists, turns, and tumults of a young woman’s perceptions and percolations. Framing the story through the lens of our heroine’s glazed-eyed jitters, Ross excavates a raw tension lurking beneath the text, music, and performances that when unearthed, reveals a holistic wonder at the heart of the whole production.
A rollercoaster, or rather dark ride through fragile imagination, our heroine’s surrounding relations take on an almost animatronic sheen, teasing mawkish glimpses, winks, and flashes of inner life while playing at a pale comparison depending on how Hound Dog feels or fears at any given moment. When “on” they are insufferably hokey; when “off” they are heartbreakingly and agonizingly just, well, human.
There is her friend and foil Ayse (a wry, sizzling Olivia AbiAssi) tasked with challenging notions of jealousy around Western opportunities versus familial stability; her former music teacher Mr. Callahan (a debonair Matt Magnusson) in a fantastic female-gaze knife-twist of a role; Yusuf (a charming chameleon Jonathan Raviv), her neighborhood's garbage collector who supplies her father with items to bolster an obsession with Elvis Presley (hence, our heroine’s only referred to name); and her father, Baba (an alternatingly outlandish and despondent Laith Nakli), moping and coping after the death of his wife and departure of his daughter.
The Imagineer behind the memory play dichotomy is our heroine Hound Dog, aptly named as she is hounded by her growing awareness of life’s messy morality and mortality. Ellena Eshraghi brings an uneasy complexity to the role, imbuing silences amidst all the noise with a piercing, powerful presence. Her quiet assuredness (“you look meek lately”) gradually unravels to shattering sympathies in the penultimate sequence, finally switching from avoidant passivity to communicative pleas for reconciliation needed to break down the walls in her mind that had been prohibiting her from stepping up to her authentic self or relationship to others.
Said walls are quite literally built into a looming, unlatching dollhouse-like exterior by Frank J. Oliva, cracking and unfurling open with banners, banisters, and entryways that play into the mind-palace escapism met with Ottoman-esque walled stoicism. Aker’s astute writing is painted in powerful shades with lighting design by Tuçe Yasak, turning stark pale washes to technicolor vivacity. Avi Amon’s music direction and sound design is perhaps the crowning jewel of this escapade, a masterful funhouse of escapism meets reality, where the echoes of Hound Dog’s inner chaos live alongside a dreamy soundscape of floating folk fantasia.
Music by Aker and the Lazours dots Aker’s play with playful didacticism, moving in and out of consciousness via a singer (the spectral, sophisticated Sahar Milani) backed by a small onstage band (Maya Sharpe, Mel Hsu, and Ashley Baier). Performing songs such as "There She Goes" and "Where It's All Gone," the singer gives voice to the emotional and grief processing Hound Dog cannot yet articulate herself. Only through cascading down a rabbithole of reverie vs. reality, East vs. West, conflict vs. compassion, can Hound Dog stop her “cryin” and learn how to be “a friend of mine.”
Production credits
Ars Nova and PlayCo present
“HOUND DOG”
By Melis Aker
With Music & Lyrics by Melis Aker & the Lazours
Directed by Machel Ross
Creative team features:
Writer & Composer Melis Aker
Composers The Lazours
Director Machel Ross
Orchestrations by Avi Amon, Daniel Lazour & The HOUND DOG Band
Music Director & Sound Designer Avi Amon
Set Designer Frank J. Oliva
Costume Designer Qween Jean
Lighting Designer Tuçe Yasak
Props Designer Patricia Marjorie
Wig Design Tommy Kurzman
Associate Director Federica Borlenghi
Assistant Set Designer Michael Ruiz-del-Vizo
Assistant Costume Designer Amelia Camilo
Associate Lighting Designer Roya Abab
Associate Sound & Systems Designer Jamie Tippett
Music Assistant Brandon Fillette
Casting The Telsey Office/ Destiny Lilly, CSA
Production Stage Manager Bryan Bauer
Assistant Stage Manager Caren Celine Morris
Company Includes Olivia AbiAssi, Ashley Baier, Ellena Eshraghi, Mel Hsu, Matt Magnusson, Sahar Milani, Laith Nakli, Jonathan Raviv, and Maya Sharpe.
“Hound Dog” runs October 6 – November 5, 2022, at Ars Nova @ Greenwich House, located at 27 Barrow Street in Manhattan. The performance runs approximately 90 minutes, no intermission. For more information visit www.arsnovanyc.com/hound-dog/.